On the 23rd March we began Week 1 of the schools closure in the UK. On the 25th March 2020 I resolved to maintain routines by starting to use the time I would normally have spent travelling or commuting to work going for a walk. Admittedly it is a little later than normal between 7.00 am and 8.00 am.

Maintaining a routine for wellbeing and resilience was the aim. So armed with a 10 year old (at least) 10 M Pixel Olympus DSLR I have been charting the changing of the local former railway track. I live on the outskirts of Haverhill on the Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex border. Literally 300 m from the front door the three counties come to together at a tripoint. The boundary between Essex and Suffolk is somewhat ill-defined as I found when I was involved with carrying out the census nearly a decade ago. Two of us turned up at the same address to distribute census papers to a particular hotel. The car park entrance was in Suffolk while the entrance to the hotel was in Essex. A much older hotel that is now shut has the border running through the building. Allegedly under old licencing laws they Essex on a Sunday was half an hour later than Suffolk so they just moved from one bar to the next when time was called in one county.

The walk itself follows part of the old railway that used to go into Haverhill South Station. We had two stations owing to the nature of lines being run originally by individual railway companies. Travelling from Colchester to Cambridge you would alight at Haverhill South and then have your baggage carried across town to Haverhill North Station, where you would resume your journey to Cambridge. Haverhill South Station is now the Wisdom Factory, more on this at another time, where they used to make toothbrushes, under the Wisdom brand name and for supermarkets. Eventually they built a viaduct connecting the two which spans what used to be main road into Haverhill from Essex. The viaduct is known locally as the Sturmer Arches.

In the time I have been taking the photographs the walk has changed markedly in the greenery. Looking at the transformation over a month it is understandable why the Greeks chose to explain the changing of the seasons with the myth of Persephone and Demeter.

Each day I go on the green welly walk, as you can see from some of the shots wellies are needed, is another record of the varied habitats of the walk.

Today’s blog is an exercise in exploring some of the features and functionality of WordPress. The main Cambridge Online Learning Community website (Cambolc) is a made using Google Sites within GSuite. The main reason being the convenience and cost. As I have frequently mentioned on Twitter in the 8 years that Cambolc has been going that cost of of running the websites through GSuite works out less than £100 a year. The limit is your imagination and technical skill. As the day job is a Science, Computer Science and Maths teacher I have some but now all of the skills. However, I am willing to learn new skills. After all in the fourth industrial revolution and remote working learning new skills will be the new normalcy.

New skill today is learning how to turn a Google Slide presentation into an embedded feature for WordPress. First task is to make your slide presentation. Going to use only a handful of images from the Green Welly Walk of 1st April 2020. Just to test the concept.

The above link did not work quite the way I intended as an embedded element but you get the idea of what might be possible with Google Slides. Ideally it would be good to have the presentation to run in the blog as a YouTube video from Cambolc’s channel. Maybe another day!